WWUTT 1596 If I Speak with the Tongues of Angels (1 Corinthians 13:1-3)

There is an idea of love that everybody has. You have certain expectations of love. The world has certain expectations of you. But a true understanding of love must come from the Bible when we understand the text.

Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is committed to teaching sound doctrine and rebuking those who contradict it. Visit our website at www .utt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

1 Corinthians 13 as the Love Chapter in Context

Thank you, Becky. We're back to our study of 1 Corinthians chapter, do you know where we are? Where are we this week? Chapter 13. Yeah, it's the love chapter of 1 Corinthians. So if you want to open up your Bible and join with me there or just follow along as I'm going to be reading from the Legacy Standard Bible, we'll go ahead and start out with all of 1 Corinthians 13, the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind, is not jealous, does not brag, is not puffed up.

It does not act unbecomingly, does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they will cease. If there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. When I became a man, I did away with childish things.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. But now abide faith, hope, love. These three, but the greatest of these is love.

Now this is a chapter that I'm all too familiar with and have preached from it many, many times. As a matter of fact, the first sermon that my wife ever heard me preach was out of 1 Corinthians 13. I have done this at many, many weddings, but in the proper context, there is a way, there's a right way to do 1 Corinthians 13 at a wedding and a wrong way, okay?

Paul is not being romantic here. He's not speaking lovey-dovey between a husband and a wife, you know, till death do you part. That's not the way that Paul is speaking. We know that he's using a rebuking tone because that has been the tone over the course of the letter.

And everything that Paul says here about love in 1 Corinthians 13, he is saying this to a church that is not exhibiting this. Now, as I've said before, regarding some of these rebukes that we read in 1 Corinthians, it doesn't mean that the entire church was wrong.

Like there were some in the church that were surely practicing what love really is. But for the most part, when you looked at that church, the impression that they left you with was that they did not understand what love is.

You know, the funny thing about that statement, having said that, like you go into the church in Corinth, you leave and you think to yourself, boy, they don't have any idea what love is, right? That's the impression that they leave.

There are many, many churches today that really think they have this down. They really think they've got the love thing down. There was a pastor just recently made a comment on Twitter. He said that it was more important.

I'm going to find this. I'm going to use this a little bit later. I was planning on writing an article about it. I won't say who this was just yet. But he said that if a church is practicing love and they have that over sound doctrinal teaching, that's actually more important and better for a church.

That is so absurdly wrong. Because you don't actually have, you don't have what you think love is. If you have a church that is not teaching soundly, the doctrine isn't sound, but hey, at least everybody is treating each other nice, right?

That was basically the argument of this particular pastor. So they actually have it better because everybody treats one another well. We'll work on the doctrine thing later. If the doctrine isn't sound, then what they're exhibiting among the members of that body is probably not actually love.

It's what they think is love. They may instead be a cult of niceness. They're just being nice to one another, but it's not truly loving. To know what love really is, we have to have a sound doctrinal understanding of what love is.

Because, as it says in 1 John, God is love. You have to have sound doctrinal understanding of who God is according to his word. So therefore, you must have the same source of knowledge with regards to knowing what love is.

Look at the culture. The culture is not doctrinally sound at all, right? You go out into the world and you try to see how the world defines love. And what do they call love? Love is love, right? That's not actually a definition, but that's what the world says love is.

LGBTQism is love. And when you tell a person no, that's an abomination. And if you don't repent of that and turn to Jesus Christ, you'll fall under the judgment of God. The world will say that you're unloving for saying such a thing.

The loving thing is to let them go along with what it is that they want to do. Let them have their sin. It's unloving to call out their sin and tell them to repent. That's what the world defines. That's what the world says is love and unloving.

So that's bad doctrine, right? And if you've got a church that is not sound in doctrine, the teaching is not good, then their understanding of love is likely not good either. So that definition or that statement by that pastor was appalling.

That he would even think that a church could have a good culture of love among its members if the doctrine is bad. The church that I came into preaching in in Kansas several years ago, you know, ten years ago now, that church was pretty bad in doctrine.

But they were very boastful in how loving they thought they were. The slogan on the front of our bulletins was, We're more than a church, we're a family. That was actually a very bad slogan, and I got rid of it pretty quick.

Because there is not being more than a church, we're a family. If you're being the church as Christ has defined the church, then you are a family. You're brothers and sisters in the Lord. You are sons and daughters of God, adopted into his family through faith in Jesus Christ.

So a properly functioning church is going to be the family and the household of God. That church turned out to be very, very good at first impressions. So they knew how to make a person feel good and feel at home when they came in the doors.

But when it came to the long-term stuff, when it came to confronting one another in sin, Oh, that was, yeah, don't go there. That became a whole upheaval when I started doing that. There were all kinds of problems going on in the church.

Again, a church that claimed to be very, very loving. They thought they were really, really good at it. And even said of me later that I was not loving because of all the changes that I had made. And one of those things involved, I had to confront one of our Sunday school teachers.

This was a kid's group because I found out that she was living with her boyfriend at a wedlock. And I and another deacon had gone to her and confronted her about that and said, You understand why you can't be teaching in this class anymore.

And I appealed to her, loved her and said, I'm calling you to repent. I'm not saying you have to leave the church. But I am saying that you need to repent of this sin. You can't teach the kids anymore.

You're going to have to repent and you need to show repentance before you can go back to leading a group or doing something like that again. But she ended up leaving the church and never coming back. And then there were people are like, why did so and so leave?

And then when they found out what it was that happened, then it became that I was the bad guy. Well, what gave you the right to do that? Why didn't you take a woman along? See, you should have had a woman along with you.

And then everything would have turned out OK. You know, it was never about the fact that she was in sin and she didn't want to repent of it. It was always somebody else did something wrong. And that was the reason why she left.

And it would have been so much better for her if she would have been in church. But now that she's gone away from the church, now she's not in church anymore. So whose fault is it that has resulted in her leaving the church?

We got to find somebody else to blame. So you see what I mean? Here's what happened when the doctrine was really bad, but the people thought they were really loving. They actually had a very godless, an unbiblical understanding of what love is.

The doctrine, the Bible was not prevailing over their definitions and understanding of love. That was going on in the church in Corinth as well. I'm sure that the people there in Corinth thought they were being loving.

Yeah, this guy who's sleeping with his mother-in-law, right, that we were reading about back in chapter five. Paul saying, why haven't you confronted this guy on that? Well, that would be an unloving thing to do.

We don't want to make anybody mad. We don't want to offend anybody. But it turned out that the church was unloving because they were tolerating this sin instead of doing something about it. And then they're taking one another to court.

So in these small matters that could be decided between brothers in the Lord, they were instead taking these matters before unbelievers and letting unbelievers preside over them and making these legal decisions.

You see all manner of how the church in Corinth was unloving. But did they know that? Did they recognize that? They probably thought they were just fine. Remember their love feasts, right? And we talked about back in chapter 11.

They had these huge feasts. They were called agape feasts, a word in Greek that means love. Look how much we love each other. We get together and we party. And Paul says, Nope, what you're doing when you come together is not loving.

It's not the Lord's Supper that you eat for. One person goes home hungry and another is drunk. You could see the separation, the division, the factions that were forming in the church in Corinth because, in fact, they really were not loving of one another.

They did not have a biblical, godly, Christ-like understanding of love. So when Paul confronts the Corinthians here, what he says about love is what the Corinthians are not doing. Paul says, he speaks, yes, he opens this particular chapter in this way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Now, what is this in the context of? As we get to this right here in chapter 13, what have we been talking about so far in 1 Corinthians?

What did we just come out of? In chapter 12, we were talking about spiritual gifts, that the spiritual man of God has been gifted by the Holy Spirit with certain abilities, gifts, talents that he might use for the benefit of the church to build the body up.

And this is all according to God's appointment. Go back to chapter 12. Consider verse 18, but now God has appointed the members, each one of them in the body, just as he desired. Verse 24, God has so composed the body, giving more abundant honor to that member which lacked.

And then in verse 28, God has appointed in the church. All of these giftings, the people that are in the church, the purposes they serve, the members that they are and how they function for the benefit of the body.

This is a work of God that is being done in the people of God. He is the one who has arranged the body with Christ as the head. And these members of the body have spiritual giftings that they use for the purpose of benefiting the body.

You go back to verse 7, but to each one is given the manifestation of the spirit for what is profitable, what may benefit the body of Christ. And Paul is going to come back to that again in chapter 14.

He'll say once again that you have this particular gift for the purpose of building up the body. Consider chapter 14, verse 3, one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and encouragement.

This is for building up the body of Christ. And so this this chapter that we have right in the middle between chapter 12 and chapter 14, you got chapter 13. All right. That's a perfect place for chapter 13 to show up.

And it's almost a parenthetical. It's almost like Paul has left the topic of the spiritual gifts for just a moment to address the matter of love, because he says right at the end of chapter 12. And I will yet show you a more excellent way.

And what is that more excellent way? The more excellent way is love. And he addresses those spiritual gifts again. Let's say you have a spiritual gift. He's even being hyperbolic here. So he's going above and beyond what he had mentioned about special gifts, spiritual gifts in chapter 12.

He says, if I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, did he say anything about speaking tongues of angels in chapter 12? No. This is not Paul saying that we can we can acquire some kind of otherworldly language like the tongues of angels that are not known to men, which some people think that they speak when they they jibber jabber in their prayers.

You know, just just say the muttering nonsense. They claim it's some sort of heavenly or divine language. It's not it's not the language of angels. And there's nothing in Scripture that says that will be granted the language of angels.

Everything that we see in the Bible about the gift of tongues, as it is given for the time and place in which it's it's appointed, it's for the purpose of speaking a human language that others may understand what is being said.

And if somebody doesn't understand what's being said, there's somebody that's supposed to translate as a as a gift of being able to translate what it was that the person was saying in tongues. Paul, we'll get to that when we get to chapter 14.

But this is something supernatural. You're speaking nonsense and mumbo jumbo. That's not supernatural. There are all kinds of pagan religions that practice that, like the Kundalini stuff, you know, the the the speaking gibberish and nonsense.

There are there are pagan traditions and religions that will that will do that. And they don't have the Holy Spirit. So the speaking muttering nonsense in Christianity is not the Holy Spirit, either. It might be a feeling of emotion that somebody is chasing after, but it is not the Holy Spirit of God.

The gift of tongues that we have in the Bible is an actual known human language. So when Paul makes a mention of the tongues of angels here in the in chapter 13, he's being hyperbolic. He's going even beyond what he was talking about regarding spiritual gifts in chapter 12.

If I speak with the tongues of men, he definitely talked about speaking in the tongues of men in chapter 12, but not angels and of angels. Let's say I have the gift of tongues. I can speak any language of men.

I can even speak languages of angels. But if I don't have love. I've become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Wouldn't we think that a person who has an ability to speak in the tongues of angels, wouldn't we say that?

That's pretty incredible. That's a pretty amazing gift. You can converse with angelic and maybe even demonic beings. You know what they're saying, and they know what you're saying. That's pretty remarkable.

But if I do not have love, it's worth nothing. And what does Paul mean here when he says love? He means that you would use this gift for the benefit of God's people. To build up your brothers and sisters in the Lord.

If God were to grant you a gift of tongues, whether you're speaking the language of men or you're speaking the language of heavenly beings. What would God be granting you that gift for? To benefit his people.

To grow one another up in love. And if you don't have love, then what's that gift useful for? Nothing. You're just making noise. You're just speaking nonsense. It's of no benefit to anyone. You've become a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.

Not very melodic. Not lovely to hear. And you're really hoping that the sound goes away. That's the way you feel about noisy gongs and clanging cymbals, right? Okay, you did it once. Don't ever do it again.

Verse 2. And if I have the gift of prophecy. Now, we've read about the gift of prophecy, right? Paul had mentioned prophecy among the spiritual gifts in chapter 12. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge.

Now, Paul did not say that the gift of prophecy was that. Again, he's being hyperbolic here. Let's say you have a gift of prophecy. And you have even more than what most people have when they're given a gift of prophecy.

You've got the ability to fathom all knowledge. All mysteries. Nothing is hidden from you. You know all. You're as omniscient as God. And if I have all faith so as to remove mountains. Because what did Jesus say about having the faith of a mustard seed?

That even with a faith this small, you have an ability to move mountains. Paul says, let's say I have all faith. I have the most faith that a person can be granted and acquire. And I can remove mountains.

Not just for myself, but for others. But if I don't do it out of love. If I don't do it for others. I'm nothing. You know all. And you can do all. But you don't have love. You are nothing. You have all knowledge.

But you're nothing. Without love. And you know there is a way that we can even think that we're doing it for somebody else. And still not have love. Verse 3. If I give all my possessions to feed the poor.

And if I surrender my body to be burned. But do not have love. It profits me nothing. See that's a really scary one to consider there. So there are people that will look like that they are giving for the benefit of others.

They look like they're even surrendering their own body unto Christ. To progress the gospel. To preach the gospel and to advance the ministry. But what do they lack? They don't actually have love in their hearts.

It looks like it on the outside but they're empty on the inside. See Jesus Christ is the one who truly knows the heart. He searches the mind and hearts of men. And he knows our intentions. We cannot hide even our intentions from God.

We might look like we're doing one thing on the outside. But God knows if we're truly being genuine. So we must humble ourselves before the Lord. Not trying to do anything for selfish gain. Not trying to do anything by appearances.

But doing things genuinely from the heart. Because our hearts have been filled up with the love of God. If we do not have love. We're a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. We're nothing. And we profit nothing.

We gain nothing. It is only when God's love is given to us. And we show that love to one another. That we have everything. And we'll come back tomorrow and talk more about what love really is. Heavenly Father I thank you for loving us.

In that while we were yet sinners. Christ died for us. As we have this wonderful sacrifice that has been demonstrated for us. In Jesus Christ our Savior. So may we be willing to consider the needs of others ahead of our own.

As we have been instructed to do. And we do this genuinely. To the praise of your name. Not our name. Not anybody else's name. We desire to extol and praise the name of God. With all that we say and do.

Even when it comes to the way that we love the people of God. May we do this genuinely. From a heart that has been transformed in Christ Jesus. To serve you all our days. We ask these things in Jesus name.

Amen.

Closing Exhortation and Ministry Sign-off

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